Mukaidaisi Muhetaer

Postdoctoral Associate in Central Asian Studies and Lecturer in Anthropology

Council on East Asian Studies , European Studies Council

Academic Year: 2024-25

Mukaidaisi Muhetaer is a Uyghur anthropologist whose work focuses on rural communities in Northwest China and Central Asia. She employs a combined approach of history and ethnography to examine the process by which state and community “complicitly” reshape or co-produce society. Her current book project investigates how variations in state power have led to changes in the types of social status/symbolic capital, how people’s livelihood strategies have been affected, and the responses of these communities in Northwest China.

Dr. Mukaidaisi Muhetaer received her Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, in 2024. Prior to joining Yale University, she held a Horizon Europe Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Palacký University.

mukaidaisi.muhetaer@yale.edu

Courses

Ethnography in China’s Borderlands

EAST 421, ANTH 421

Methods such as participant observation, interviews, surveys, and ethnography are based on the assumption of access to a field. This course looks at whether and how one can understand a society if access is restricted and dangerous for local participants. We study the cluster of concepts known as “remote ethnography”—studying on-the-ground conditions from a distance—through the case of Xinjiang, China. It looks critically at methods used by journalists, social scientists, governments, corporations and others in situations where access is not possible, including open-source research, close reading of official texts, social media analysis, digital survey techniques, remote imaging, and diaspora interviews. In particular, we ask if these can be done without detailed knowledge of local context, culture and history, and study how these sources relate to recent ethnographic knowledge about people’s lives in rural southern Xinjiang. Students become familiar with the main concepts of remote ethnography and acquire basic tools for their own research. By the end of the semester, they also prepare to critically assess the methods used by anthropologists, social scientists, journalists and others in studying closed societies.

Seminar

Fall 2024

Th 3:30 PM - 5:20 PM